RAID, which is short for Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology that makes it possible for a system to use a number of hard drives as one single logical unit. In other words, all of the drives are used as one and the information on all of them is identical. This type of a configuration has 2 major advantages over using just a single drive to keep data - the first is redundancy, so in case one drive doesn't work, the info will be accessed through the others, and the second is better performance because the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be spread among several drives. You can find different RAID types depending on how many drives are used, whether reading and writing are both done from all drives concurrently, whether data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, and so on. Determined by the exact setup, the fault tolerance and the performance may vary.

RAID in Cloud Website Hosting

All content that you upload to your new cloud website hosting account will be placed on quick NVMe drives that work in RAID-Z. This setup is built to employ the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud Internet hosting platform and it adds another level of protection for your website content on top of the real-time checksum validation which ZFS uses to ensure the integrity of the data. With RAID-Z, the data is stored on several disks and at least 1 is a parity disk - whenever data is recorded on it, an extra bit is added, so in the event that any drive stops functioning for some reason, the stability of the info can be verified by recalculating its bits based on what is stored on the production drives and on the parity one. With RAID-Z, the functioning of our system won't be interrupted and it'll continue operating efficiently until the malfunctioning drive is changed and the information is synchronized on it.